A study of simple usage-based charging schemes for broadband networks
Costas Courcoubetis, Frank P. Kelly, Vasilios A. Siris, Richard Weber · 1998
Operators of high-speed networks are interested in implementing simple charging schemes with which they can fairly recover costs from their customers and effectively allocate network resources. This paper describes an approach for computing such charges from simple measurements (the duration and transferred volume of a connection), and relating these to bounds of the effective bandwidth. A requirement for usage-based charging schemes is that they capture the relative amount of resources used by connections. Based on this criteria, we evaluate our approach for Internet Wide Area Network traffic. Furthermore, its incentive compatibility is displayed with an example involving deterministic multiplexing, and the effect of pricing on a network’s equilibrium is investigated for deterministic and statistical multiplexing.